Monday, May 28, 2012

My Ghana Days, by Suzanne

View from my house to Ashesi campus, on the second hill just
to the right of the middle of the picture - photo taken 5pm-ish

Sane view,photo taken around 6:45am

People (well, o.k., my Mom and my husband) have been asking
about my days here this visit. I’m here
about 6 weeks, staying at the faculty house about a 10 minute drive from
Ashesi, outside the village of Berekuso 60+ minutes north of Accra (it’s
actually not very far at all, but the road is bad so you can’t go very fast). So here’s one of my typical days: wake at 6am
with the sun (and sometimes my phone alarm), make my tea (in an electric kettle
if there’s power, more often the old fashioned way on the stove), take my
shower (if no power, then it’s kind of like standing under a trickle, but it’s
surprisingly effective), get dressed, get picked by Nina the Ashesi Chief
Librarian around 7am, into work by about 7:10.
Most mornings Ashesi’s campus, which is on the top of a hill, is within
a cloud, so it’s pretty cool (literally and figuratively) to drive into the
cloud each morning. My class is at 8:30
so I have just enough time to finalize what I will do that day without stressing
too much, drop readings off at the library for scanning, etc. I either eat at
home with my tea or if I’m running late bring a cliff bar and eat at my desk
while prepping. Class runs 8:30 to 11:40 (1/2 lecture, then a break, then lab),
then I head back to my office for a few minutes, sort myself out, post the
powerpoint I just used and links, etc., then maybe check email briefly before I
head to lunch. Trying to keep up with my
first-world email here is tough, the quantity is tremendous – another thing I
hadn’t noticed so much in the always-connected fast internet world of the
States. Since I really only have about 5
hours a day of internet and I spend 1 hour of it eating lunch, and at least 3
hours prepping for the next day, getting through email often doesn’t happen in
any given day. So, very sorry if I
haven’t responded to an email you sent – I haven’t been on Facebook either L. Hopefully I’ll catch up.

Lunch is a wonderful spot in my day. Ashesi is such a close-knit community that
mostly people don’t “go to lunch” with each other – you just wander over to the
canteen when you’re hungry and free, order and pick up your food, and then sit
with whoever is there and visit with them.
Or if no one else is there or if their table is already full, you just
start a new table and someone will be along to join you soon enough. I really like it because I get to chat with
just about everybody without having to make “appointments”. The food at the canteen is great, also – good
Ghanaian cooking, usually three choices and two sizes each. The Ghanaian diet it heavy on the starch
(rice or yam or fufu or banku or kenke or plantain), the full portion is too
much for me of the starch especially, so I have started doing what many of the
American or Europeans do at the Ashesi canteen – order the smaller portion and
then pay for an extra order of meat – meat is more of a condiment here, so even
with the extra portion of meat you get, for example, about one small chicken
drumstick. But it works well for me, so
I am somewhat hungry but not very for dinner.

My office is the leftmost you can see on the top -
maybe you can tell my door is open

Ashesi courtyard view from my office, looking towards other
offices to the right and classrooms & labs straight across

The afternoon is mostly spent doing whatever absolutely
needs to be done for the next day, then if I am catching a ride with Nina again
I need to leave at 4:45, which means that at about 4:30 I start logging out of
the courseware (Moodle) system, closing my files, shutting down my laptop, packing
my backpack, running to the Ashesi convenience store to buy the water I need
for the night, etc., to be in the parking lot around 4:45. I can usually see Nina walk by so I know
when I need to dash out. This week I
have stayed late a few nights and caught a ride with someone else, to have
another 30-60 min or so of light and internet.
But if I ride with Nina then I get home in time to accompany Nana on her
nightly walk. Nana stays at the faculty
house most days during the week, but returns to her house outside of Accra for
the weekends. At home, Nana and I (and
maybe others if they’re around) mostly cut up some fruit (mango, pineapple,
banana) for dinner and supplement with a little something else – she made a
pudding dessert one night, we got some leftovers from a friend from work one
night, we have had cheese and crackers a few nights, or even just avocado and
crackers. We have a nice leisurely
dinner, we chat for awhile, then we do the dishes and wander off to work some, then
go to bed. That’s about it!

Most weekends I’ll travel at least some – the first weekend
to the beach one night then with the Jackson’s in Accra one night. The next weekend I’ll go into Accra Saturday
night – it’s Ken’s graduation from Lincoln (where my kids went to school and
where Fox graduated from). And of
course, church on Sunday! It was
FANTASTIC being back at Asbury-Dunwell last week, I can’t wait to go again!